Frightmare

Years after being committed to an insane asylum for practicing cannibalism, a married couple (Rupert Davies and Sheila Keith) are let back into society… Of all the grisly horrors directed by Pete Walker, Britain’s chief specialist in shock cinema, Frightmare is perhaps his best known work. Much of this has to do with the memorably lurid ad campaign, not to mention the indelible image of elderly Sheila Keith advancing towards the camera, wide-eyed and brandishing a power drill. Typical of Walker’s films, Frightmare abandons subtlety in favor of outright jabs at the establishment while embracing graphic gore and mayhem in a manner that makes the Hammer films of the period look positively quaint in comparison. After spending nearly twenty years in jail for a series of cannibalistic murders, Dorothy Yates and her husband Edmund, who was jailed for his attempted cover-up of his wife’s ghoulish tastes, are apparently cured and released back into society. Their two daughters are haunted by the fiendish deeds of their ghastly parents, and soon the killings begin again. But is it Dorothy this time, or someone else?